Hardware Emulation With QEMU

“QEMU is an open source cross-platform emulator for Linux hosts. It allows you to emulate a number of hardware architectures (x86, x86-64, and PowerPC are currently known to work, with others, including SPARC and MIPS, in development). QEMU thereby lets you run another operating system on top of your existing OS. Going through the process of installing and configuring QEMU not only gave me a worthwhile new software tool, but also helped me learn a few things about Linux.”

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8 Comments

2005-10-31 5:42 pm

I enjoyed this article because I am interested in such a tool at the moment. Having never really used tools like VMWare, Bochs, and Qemu, I was wondering if someone who has used them all could comment on the performance, features, etc of each.

2005-10-31 6:03 pm

I am writing an Operating System for my final year project. I am going to be using QEMU for some of the testing and debugging. What other debugging tools are there for OS development and can you use some of the XP techniques in OSDEV.

Like writing test cases and creating code to pass them. ( I know that in the initial phases of OS this won’t be possible) Has anybody had any first hand experience doing this type of thing ?

2005-10-31 6:20 pm

Not exhaustive, but a brief overview:

1- VMWare: very good and mature, nice gui, fast but also expensive ($199 USD).

2- Parallels Workstation: very good, nice gui and also very fast (around $100 USD, the product hasn’t been released yet but Beta 3 was really impressive!).

3- QEMU: very good, no gui yet, not as fast as the ones above but you can install KQEMU (Kernel QEMU) to get a great performance boost. I’ve heard many people switching from VMWare to QEMU! (free). You may also have a look at Win4Lin PRO which is a commercial product using QEMU.

4- Bochs: experimental, no gui, slow (free).

Personally I’m using QEMU, I even developed a graphical frontend for it: http://www.exprofesso.com/jqemu. I’m running W2K on SuSE Linux and everything works great inside the virtual machine (even my sound card), I can access my Samba shares/printers inside Windows without any problem!

Used Bochs for a Minix OS project for the OS class and while it was rather easy I hated it for the speed. Good thing I had a phat laptop to compile. I think after every change we made and we had to recompile the code through bochs I believe, it took me like 2 and a half minutes while on my friends machines it took well over 5-8 minutes.

QEMU was very interesting to me as it seemed to be waaaay faster than bochs.

qemu is easy to compile easy to use and fast I use it to run windows 98 pagemaker 7 to create pdf documents for a newspaper in a pentium IV 2Ghz and it works very well, now the kqemu module works with windows 98, it works great, I use it to complete my thin client network for programs like pagemaker that yet don’t work in wine for users that need this type of programs, if you have a copy of windows98 from an old machine and have the need for that ocassional application that you missed working on linux this is definetely the way to go. I previously use VMware but qemu is better for my purposes and free, and it is being worked on continually, is a great project I recommended very much.

2005-11-04 2:18 am

Vmware is faster and feature rich. Now with the free vmware “player” it has even more use.